Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine

Medical expert Paul A. Offit, MD, offers a scathing exposé of the alternative medicine industry, revealing how even though some popular therapies are remarkably helpful due to the placebo response, many of them are ineffective, expensive, and even deadly. Dr. Offit reveals how alternative medicine - an unregulated industry under no legal obligation to prove its claims or admit its risks - can actually be harmful to our health. Using dramatic real-life stories, Offit separates the sense from the nonsense.

Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine

In recent years there have been major outbreaks of whooping cough among children in California, mumps in New York, and measles in Ohio's Amish country - despite the fact that these are all vaccine-preventable diseases. Although America is the most medically advanced place in the world, many people disregard modern medicine in favor of using their faith to fight life-threatening illnesses. In 21st-century America, how could this be happening?

Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

No skill is more important in today's world than being able to think about, understand, and act on information in an effective and responsible way. What's more, at no point in human history have we had access to so much information, with such relative ease, as we do in the 21st century. But because misinformation out there has increased as well, critical thinking is more important than ever. These 24 rewarding lectures equip you with the knowledge and techniques you need to become a savvier, sharper critical thinker in your professional and personal life.

The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

The Panic Virus is a gripping scientific detective story about how grassroots radicals, snake-oil salesmen, and cynical journalists have perpetrated the biggest health-scare hoax of all time. It explores what happens when the media treats all viewpoints as equally valid, regardless of facts, from parents who are convinced that vaccines caused their children's autism to right-wing radicals who believe that climate change is a myth

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

A Nobel Peace Prize recipient beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was celebrated by heads of state and adored by millions for her work on behalf of the poor. In his measured critique, Hitchens asks only that Mother Teresa's reputation be judged by her actions - not the other way around. With characteristic élan and rhetorical dexterity, Hitchens eviscerates the fawning cult of Teresa, recasting the Albanian missionary as a spurious, despotic, and megalomaniacal operative.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.

Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond

Why the Right Went Wrong offers a historical view of the right since the 1960s. Its core contention is that American conservatism and the Republican Party took a wrong turn when they adopted Barry Goldwater's worldview during and after the 1964 campaign. Since 1968, no conservative administration could live up to the rhetoric rooted in the Goldwater movement that began to reshape American politics 50 years ago.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

A novelist, thinker, and entrepreneur, Rolf Dobelli deftly shows that in order to lead happier, more prosperous lives, we don't need extra cunning, new ideas, shiny gadgets, or more frantic hyperactivity - all we need is less irrationality. Simple, clear, and always surprising, this indispensable audiobook will change the way you think and transform your decision making - at work, at home, every day.

God - the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

Throughout history, arguments for and against the existence of God have been largely confined to philosophy and theology, while science has sat on the sidelines. Despite the fact that science has revolutionized every aspect of human life and greatly clarified our understanding of the world, somehow the notion has arisen that it has nothing to say about the possibility of a supreme being, which much of humanity worships as the source of all reality.

Diet Cults: The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating for the Rest of Us

From the national best-selling author of Racing Weight, Matt Fitzgerald exposes the irrationality, half-truths, and downright impossibility of a "single right way" to eat and reveals how to develop rational, healthy eating habits.

The Science of Energy: Resources and Power Explained

To better put into perspective the various issues surrounding energy in the 21st century, you need to understand the essential science behind how energy works. And you need a reliable source whose focus is on giving you the facts you need to form your own educated opinions.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

In his provocative new book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion - including faith, dogma, and revelation - leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.

Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, 2nd Edition

"It doesn't take an Einstein to understand modern physics," says Professor Wolfson at the outset of these 24 lectures on what may be the most important subjects in the universe: relativity and quantum physics. Both have reputations for complexity. But the basic ideas behind them are, in fact, simple and comprehensible by anyone. These dynamic and illuminating lectures begin with a brief overview of theories of physical reality starting with Aristotle and culminating in Newtonian or "classical" physics.

The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom

We are living in the most moral period of our species’ history. Best-selling author Michael Shermer’s most accomplished and ambitious book to date demonstrates how the scientific way of thinking has made people, and society as a whole, more moral. Ever since the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment thinkers consciously applied the methods of science to solve social and moral problems.

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

In this irreverent and illuminating audiobook, acclaimed writer and scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, chance, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious causes, when in actuality they are more profoundly influenced by chance.

Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution

Origins explains the soul-stirring leaps in our understanding of the cosmos. From the first image of a galaxy birth to Spirit rover's exploration of Mars, to the discovery of water on one of Jupiter's moons, coauthors Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith conduct a galvanizing tour of the cosmos with clarity and exuberance.

Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

In Saving Capitalism, Robert Reich reveals the entrenched cycles of power and influence that have damaged American capitalism, perpetuating a new oligarchy in which the 1 percent get ever richer and the rest - middle and working class alike - lose ever more economic agency, making for the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity since World War II.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

In this groundbreaking book, journalist and innovation expert Warren Berger shows that one of the most powerful forces for igniting change in business and in our daily lives is a simple, underappreciated tool - one that has been available to us since childhood. Questioning - deeply, imaginatively, "beautifully" - can help us identify and solve problems, come up with game-changing ideas, and pursue fresh opportunities. So why are we often reluctant to ask "Why?"

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True

Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous evolutionary biologist, presents a gorgeously lucid, science book examining some of the nature’s most fundamental questions both from a mythical and scientific perspective. Science is our most precise and powerful tool for making sense of the world. Before we developed the scientific method, we created rich mythologies to explain the unknown. The pressing questions that primitive men and women asked are the same ones we ask as children. Who was the first person? What is the sun? Why is there night and day?

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

Why Evolution Is True

Why evolution is more than just a theory: it is a fact. In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design", there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned: the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection.

Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior

Throughout much of human history, our most important stories were passed down orally - including the stories about Jesus before they became written down in the Gospels. In this fascinating and deeply researched work, leading Bible scholar Bart D. Erhman investigates the role oral history has played in the New Testament - how the telling of these stories not only spread Jesus' message but helped shape it.

Publisher's Summary

New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter has twice won the Global Health Council’s Excellence in Media Award, as well as the Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In Denialism, he fervently argues that people are turning away from new technologies and engaging in a kind of magical thinking that is hindering scientific progress.

This book is an example of how “common sense” is not all that common. Tackling many myths about science – and the growing popular belief that science is “evil” but alternatives are “good,” Michael Specter shows us how the scientific method holds the key to the continuing existence of our species. He urges us not to go back to the era when we believed that “science” was all good and urges us to investigate discoveries rationally – not hysterically. He does raise some serious ethical questions – some of which do not have ready answers. This is all the more reason for us to learn how to neither investigate new discoveries with hysteria nor compete faith and acceptance. The book is well narrated – fast paced – and very compelling.

First, the narrator gives the book the exciting breathless manner the book deserves. Science and education are the best defense we have against the denialist of the scientific method and believers in anecdotal data over reason. Oddly, the best chapter in the book is on Vioxx and how the pharmaceutical companies purposely mislead us on its side effects. That leads to a partial defense wrongly used by anti-immunization zealots justifying their positions for not trusting everything "they" tell us.

I think the book made the conflict of science against denialist a little more pessimistic than things really are. I'm betting on science to win out.

BTW, for the author, if your writing a book on science make sure you get all of your science right. You made a brief statement that how following science would lead one with iron deficiency to eat more iron. Read the book "Half Life of Facts" on how spinach does not contain loads of iron and is just a falsehood.

The summary accurately states "...he fervently argues that people are turning away from new technologies and engaging in a kind of magical thinking that is hindering scientific progress." It is unfortunate that the book was not written by someone with a more scientific and focused approach because his theme is so very important to our future. Surely he would admit that ideology, whether it is religious or nationalistic, is a fundamental force in denialism. A good book would have spent more time on that then on a few anti-vaccine crusaders. Where are the chapters on the evolution deniers, climate change deniers, over population deniers, etc. While his thesis is laudable his approach, which can be insulting and demeaning, can do more harm than good. Never before have I started a book in more agreement with an author and ended it more doubtful.

Would you ever listen to anything by Michael Specter again?

perhaps but not likely

Have you listened to any of Richard Poe’s other performances before? How does this one compare?